III

 
The contradiction between objectivity and specificity was a balancing act between two opposite pulls. Avoid judgment in the way you photograph, so refrain from critical commentary in your decisions to record this decisive gesture. It was important to achieve a specificity that requires some critical sense of what you are looking at. What kind of criteria could justify the decision of what was specific and what wasn’t? In the case of dance, it was the kind of movement explored in the choreographic work that enabled me to define what differentiated Trisha Brown from Yvonne Rainer. In the case of theater it was the use of deep space and the staging of the entrance and the exit that enabled me to distinguish between Richard Foreman and Robert Wilson. I thrived in the theater proscenium setting, because photographing an event that positioned the audience without any uncertainty was easier. I prepared by looking at rehearsals without shooting, coming the next day to shoot what I was seeing but also what I remembered having seen the day before. I felt I could discover what was specific by just remembering what I had found memorable on a first viewing of the work. While respecting the structure of the performance, I felt free to do some interpretations by merely using my own reactions, based on the specificity I saw in one work that was absent in another.

I ended up with the criteria of the “new”, which was very much a key quality in art circles all through the 1970s. Around 1976, I settled on a practice that shifted back and forth within the bracket of two modes, an automat mode that I called “shooting without thinking” and an urgent mode that I referred to as “shooting the specificity of the work”.[9] I also kept the practice of taking as many chances as possible, experimenting with darkroom skills to produce better negatives that had less contrast. This implied spending more time looking and examining the contact sheets before going back to shoot the same work a second or third time. So I could modify some choices I had previously made and could assess what I had missed and therefore could capture at the next photo session. I reached the point when planning trumped intuition, which could undercut my pleasure. The desire to look is necessary when shooting photographs. To a certain degree, I feel you can only shoot photographs if you take on a totally innocent and naïve position in front of the work. If your planning turns into an obsession, you lose. You should never feel that you have exhausted the material. If you do, you have to stop shooting this particular kind of work.

I continued shooting theater, dance, and performance all through the 1970s and became increasingly aware of the significant differences between the three.[10] Theater was more predictable because often it was repeatable and you could go to rehearsal before shooting the dress rehearsal. The challenge was to avoid being trapped in “shooting for the lines”. I never listened to the spoken text, as I was solely focused on visual matter.

Dance was more challenging if you dealt with a group piece. Solo work was simpler, because you only had to decipher one dancer’s movements. The position of the soloist in relation with the background was not that important and could be neutralized by composition and focus. But in the choreography for a group piece, the dancers’ relation to the space was the main problem for the photographer as you had to capture at least two things: the movement of each dancer and the interactions and spatial composition between the dancers. Since the background was important in establishing those variable interactions in a group piece, you often composed the shot with the background rather than without.

For performances in the strict sense of “performance art”, often associated with just one performer (Vito Acconci, Joan Jonas, Jack Smith, Stuart Sherman, and later Michael Smith and others), rehearsals were rare. You had little prior knowledge of what you were going to shoot. The photographs were mostly shot during the actual performance in the presence of an audience that could be anywhere. Often the performance space was unpredictable as well. Interactions with objects used as props were often what the performance was about and you dealt with the issue of scale between the performer’s body and small props, which you had no control over. Most artists didn’t always carry their preoccupations in staging, audience mode of address, and vocabulary, from one piece to the next. There was a lack of consistency in the work and what had been done in the last performance didn’t apply to the next one. What the performance artist implied in the multiple activities shown in the piece was a specific relation between audience and performer. The audience's position in relation to the performance was key to the comprehension of the work.[11] The photographer’s challenge was to make visible the interactions between performer(s) and audience in the space. My main guideline was to identify with the position of the spectator in the middle of the audience.[12] I was trying to capture the mental images that would become what an audience would likely remember of the piece. Those often became the “iconic” images for the piece. So my first impulse was to decide where I should physically position myself to photograph. In some art performances this decision was more difficult than in theater or dance. After the camera position, the most important for me was to decide what lens I should use to find the proper scale between the performers’ bodies, the actions that are performed, and the space itself.[13]

Although you could be motivated by sound effects to shoot some photographs, the sound as in all other forms of performance, wasn’t represented in the photo. It was also impossible to represent how actions could be stretched out or slowed down. Time manipulation was a familiar trope in Robert Wilson’s work as he systematically used very slow movement. For instance, one performer would take twenty minutes to cross the stage diagonally while others would move faster or stop altogether. The attention needed to witness a slow movement is tantalizing because the spectator’s concentration varies in the course of the movement’s duration.[14] Photography deals with composing in relation to a frame that can be precisely defined by the photographer by means of the scenic design or intentionally obliterated via soft focus or close up. But how long it takes to do something that can’t really be photographed. You need motion picture or video to render the duration of a performance and the audience’s reactions during the unfolding of the performance itself.

The practice of recording dance rehearsal started almost immediately after the Sony Portapak became common. Video appeared at first as a tool for securing improvised movements that could be recaptured later. I think, Twyla Tharp was the first who used video as an annotation tool in dance rehearsal starting around 1972.[15] The quality of the video was not good enough to show fully what had gone on to an audience that hadn’t been there. So the videotape was just useful for the people that had participated in the improvisation, but it wasn’t very readable for an outsider.